Ketogenic Diet for Longevity and overall wellness

[Vastness]

I have recently become interested in the Ketogenic Diet, for reasons of wanting to maximise my health and overall wellness, and I am curious if anyone has any experience on it long-term, your reasons for doing it, and if it did indeed have the benefits that it's proponents claim.

I have tried to significantly reduce my carb intake the past few days (although not exactly to "true" keto levels) to around 20% of my overall macronutrient intake, and I don't know if it is just placebo, but I think I do feel healthier! However I have felt a little weaker at times also, especially just after waking up in the morning.

I have read that full adaptation typically takes around 3 weeks and the adaptation is not pleasant, however I do not think that at this time in my life I can really afford to have 3 weeks in a low-carb-induced daze, so I was wondering if it would work to just adapt more slowly. Say have a week at 20% carbs, then try to cut down to 15%, 10%, etc and thus allow my body to acclimatize more slowly to the reduced carbohydrate levels. Is there any reason, scientific, or otherwise, that this would not work?

 

[CFC]

Most people find that, when they lower carb intake, they start to feel better. Just 5-10% carbs in your diet would be adequate for most people.

Proper ketogenic dieting, as you point out, takes some time to adapt to. The body needs to adjust to increased ketones but moreso optimise fat oxidation and also the process of gluconeogenesis (glucose production from protein/aminos). It doesn't really suit most lifestyles, and rarely becomes a permanent choice.

However cutting back slowly will help you in terms of adjusting without lethargy and periods of low blood sugar.

 

[starting_over]

Anecdotal but an old coworker was on a strict keto diet, she had quite offensive "keto breath"

 

[-=SS=-]

Joe Rogan?

 

[thujone]

i went keto-diet for 6+ months to fix digestive issues but sleep quality was suffering since there was nothing i could do to prevent blood sugar dropping too low in the middle of the night so i changed to low-carb and now eat a small carb snack (bread or rice) before bed and it's perfect for me. typically i max out at about 50g gross carbs daily for the year so far (including vegetable, fruit and wine carbs), i don't consider myself very active but i bike 10-15km daily and do weight training every second day as well and if i sleep well then energy levels are good.

my current diet runs parallel to what is commonly referred to as the "mediterranean diet" and i feel it's a good balance of macro ratios and micronutrient ratios, which are also important to get a diversity of to maintain proper cellular functions. imho going keto alone has no long-term value and it's fine for people trying it to drop a lot of weight quickly but more or less a fad diet and just a contemporary analogue of the Atkins diet.

 

[Vastness]

Thanks for your responses all. Having been religiously tracking my macros for a few weeks I think I have some kind of carbohydrate intolerance. I have also had some kind of digestive problem that has been on and off since I was a teenager now, and just recently I've been trying to go to the doctors but usually they just send me away with the recommendation to drink peppermint tea and the (what I perceive to be) non-diagnosis of some form of IBS. I did recently have a blood and stool test for a few things like Coeliac Disease or gluten allergy and both apparently came back negative.

I actually thought I might be lactose intolerant for a while but actually since going pseudo-Keto, 15-20% carbs, I have drank a ton of milk and milk products with seemingly no ill-effects, so either lactose is not a triggering sugar for me, or it is simply about the quantity of carbs. On days where I go up to 30%+ carbs or over 200g, I just consistently start to feel like shit as the day goes on... I feel like this is a whole body thing and not just localised to my gut but obviously I realise there is a strong connection between the "digestive nervous system", so to speak, so maybe this is a food allergy type thing.

i went keto-diet for 6+ months to fix digestive issues

Was your situation any similar to what I'm describing? Also, did you do anything else to "fix" this like slowly trying to add different types of carbs back in? I am thinking about how best to do this but at the moment it seems like a daunting and bewildering task to narrow down the cause of my issues.

I am kind of derailing my own thread here but what the hell, I think at this point I don't have much interest in going full-keto as this pseudo-keto diet seems to be so much benefit to me.

Just 5-10% carbs in your diet would be adequate for most people.

When you say "most people"... is this an activity level based assessment? I feel like my lifestyle is a little more active than average, and although I have been doing OK with aerobic/endurance type exercise so far, I am just about to start lifting seriously for a few months in an effort to bulk up and I am concerned that I am going to have to make a choice between limiting how much I can get out of this, and just sucking it up and eating carbs for gains and feeling like shit half the time.

I might post a somewhat related thread about this in PED, but so far I have found it kind of frustrating that everything I've read stresses the importance of carbs when bulking, and is written more from the perspective of swaying those who are trying to avoid carbs for some airy health reasons rather than an actual, tangible physical and psychological effect like they seem to have on me.

I would like to just get my glycogen top-ups from copious extra amounts of protein, I mean, there's a limit to how much protein can go into building muscle so surely if I just consume enough of a surplus I can just let my body make it's own glucose... I know carbs are supposedly a quicker source of energy, but, is it possible to bulk just as quickly and train just as hard on a low carb diet? I mean I think I am just gonna try anyway out of, as I see it, medical necessity, but I would appreciate if you (or anyone) had any input on ways I could optimise this, or perhaps what kind of carbs would be "safest" to experiment with.

 

[thujone]

yeah the digestive system is a complex beast with far-reaching influence, i'm not sure there is a definitive answer since the mechanisms at play are so diverse.

i'm not lactose or gluten intolerant either but fucking with carbs/sugar too much was giving me candidiasis and slowing my digestion down making it worse. instead of peppermint tea my secret weapons were cabbage and ginger. i avoided peppermint tea because of high incidence of side-effects so i dunno why a doc would advise that over a better alternative like ginger, although AFAIK peppermint doesn't thin the blood like ginger so there may be contraindications to consider. the gingerols are wicked fierce and sauerkraut helped when heartburn was so bad even ginger wouldn't fix it. i still eat sauerkraut almost daily (supposedly it's rich in probiotics as well) and steamed cabbage is pretty good as a vegetable with some pepper and fats.

really i only went off the keto diet because i couldn't get restful sleep and it took a while to figure out that it was because my blood sugar was dropping too low in the night and having a snack of ~30g carbs within a few hours of sleep fixed that issue. there are days when i'll have 150g of carbs but it doesn't seem to create more energy than the days where i have my usual <50g so whenever i'm feeling less than sated i'd rather fill myself with veggies since there's pretty much no chance of getting type 2 diabetes from eating too much veggies.